A GRADUATE used Artificial Intelligence to cheat on an exam — and still got a degree.
Pieter Snepvangers, 22, got Microsoft’s controversial software ChatGPT to come up with a 2,000-word essay.
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He gave the result to a university lecturer to mark — who gave it a 2:2 pass.
Londoner Pieter recently got a 2:1 in Politics and Social Policy from Bristol University — without cheating. But as an experiment he asked a lecturer from another establishment if he could take their final-year social policy assessment to see if he could spot if AI had written it.
He started off by asking the software the essay question and requested 2,000 words.
The software only managed to give back 365 words at first. So Pieter asked it ten separate questions and eventually got 3,500 words back.
He then took the best paragraphs and copied and pasted them in an order that “resembled the structure of an essay”.
Pieter said: “All in all, 20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning. Not bad. I nervously sent it off to my lecturer and awaited the verdict.”
The lecturer said the essay used “good proper language” and he could have been convinced it was written by a lazy student.
He also said “it wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content”. The lecturer added: “You definitely can’t cheat your way to a first class degree, but you can cheat your way to a 2:2”
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Pieter added: “ChatGPT is only three months old. You wouldn’t bet against it being able to write an essay worthy of a 2:1 in another three months.”
